Beach chair condemnation

Nearly a month ago, half past 11 at night, I stood on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico and looked up at the infinite sky, and I realized once again the smallness of my existence. This was no feat though. I could have determined the same thing by studying the anthill on the sidewalk. The stars and the ants have one thing in common: they share a reality that I can never know, a complexity that escapes me, that goes on all around me while I stand oblivious in the corner tapping repetitively on the screen of a phone looking up things about stars and ants because I don’t have a life to dedicate to astronomy and entomology. I need inspiration now, 4G inspiration to be exact, although I have no idea what 4G means or how satellites work or anything really outside of the embarrassingly narrow field of knowledge that I have managed to collect and retain after 19 years of schooling.

The real beauty though is that I don’t need anyone to tell me what the stars mean. I can look directly at them, for just a moment, and see for myself the truth that they represent. It is the truth of possibility. What limit is there on life when the light of the stars burns visible at distances we couldn’t travel in 50 lifetimes? Tell me what cannot be done when the tiny ant never strays from her work, faithful to her role in sustaining the homeostasis of the mound, of the insect kingdom, of the world?

What say you? Not people, you say? You mean that even with all the humbling glory of the stars, man sets himself above others? Even with the incredible, the explanation-defying example of logic and order set by nature, human beings live in disorder, in disarray? Inefficiency? Wasted time? Hatred? Self-interest? It can’t be true. It must be an aberration, a bad sample. Look again.

Look again and you will find the honest, never-straying worker who reports on time, brings home the food, nurtures the young, and protects the home. Look and you can find the civilian doctor working in a war zone tent, the community resident visiting nursing home shut-a-ways. There are everywhere examples of strength, courage, compassion, selflessness and love.

Although, I'll give it to you, cynic, that in the day to day, as you go about your errands dropping off the dry cleaning and picking up blood pressure medicine at the Walgreens drive thru, you are not driven to tears by the humanity of your fellow humans. But maybe it's less them and more us. Maybe when you spot the customer turning their blood pressure med pick-up into a combo cigarette and Cheetos refill-run and then overhear them complain about the three dollars they had to pick up as part of their government insurance plan, you should be reminded about your own internal inconsistencies. But that's just it - we're always pointing out the obvious, always shaking our heads as we go down our own self-destructive paths, muttering "idiot" under our breath. We might as well be muttering in front of the mirror.

As I stood on the shore, staring at the sky, I thought about the ocean soothingly beating the sand, the same way it beats the sand in every other place. That same ocean, unbroken by land, touches every continent and the shores of every country on the sea. As the water rolled up under my feet, I became part of wherever the water went, connected to the lives of those it washed over. But this is just sentiment, just bad poetry. I am already connected to the lives of those who the ocean touches, and those it doesn’t. Every person is a citizen of the world, responsible for honoring the opportunity we all share. The greatest reminder of how small we really are is the size of our aggregate, of our collective hopes and dreams. The accompanying tragedy is that their realization is sacrificed by the individualism that gave birth to them, and, most days, we are little more than individuals. That feeling we get when we know we’re shrugging off the reality happening all around us because we don’t want it to invade our lives, our leisure, our vacation: that’s us. The condemnation of the impoverishing effect of individualism from a beach chair: that was me a month ago. Looking back now, I’m glad I walked out there. Productive.